3.1Basic Overview

3.1.1The player’s controls

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Throughout this manual, the buttons on the player are labelled according to the picture
above. Whenever a button name is prefixed by “Long”, a long press of approximately one
second should be performed on that button. The buttons are described in detail in the
following paragraph.

Additional information for blind users is available on the Rockbox website at BlindFAQ.

Note: The following description is for the Gigabeat F, but can also apply for the Gigabeat X.
The Gigabeat F is slightly larger and more rectangular shaped, while the Gigabeat X is
smaller and has a slightly tapered back.

Hold the player with the screen on top and the controls on the right hand side. Below the
screen is a cross-shaped touch sensitive pad which contains the Up, Down, Left and Right
controls. On the Gigabeat X, this pad will feel slightly raised up, while it will feel slightly
sunken in on the Gigabeat F. On the top of the unit, from left to right, are the power socket,
the Hold switch, and the headphone socket. The Hold switch puts the player into hold mode
when it is switched to the right of the unit. The buttons will have no effect when this is the
case.

Starting from the left hand side on the bottom of the unit, nearer to the front than the back,
is a recessed switch which controls whether the battery is on or off. When this switch is to the
left, the battery is disconnected. This can be used for a hard reset of the unit, or if the player
is being placed in storage. Next to that is a connector for the docking station and finally on
the right hand side of the bottom of the unit is a mini USB socket for connecting directly to
USB.

Finally on the right hand side of the unit are some control buttons. Going from the
bottom of the unit to the top there is a small round A buttton then a rocker volume
switch with of the Volume down button below the Volume up button. Above
that is are two more small round buttons, the Menu button and nearest to the top
of the unit the Power button, which is held down to turn the player on or off. If
you have a Gigabeat X, these buttons are small metallic buttons that are place
further up on the right hand side, and closer together. The layout is still the same,
however.

3.1.2Turning the player on and off

To turn on and off your Rockbox enabled player use the following keys:

Key

Remote Key

Action

Power

Start Rockbox

Long Power

Shutdown Rockbox

On shutdown, Rockbox automatically saves its settings.

If you have problems with your settings, such as accidentally having set the colours to black on
black, they can be reset at boot time. See the Reset Settings in section 12.3.3 for
details.

In the unlikely event of a software failure, hardware poweroff or reset can be performed by
holding down the battery switch until the player shuts off or reboots.

3.1.3Putting music on your player

With the player connected to the computer as an MSC/UMS device (like a USB Drive),
music files can be put on the player via any standard file transfer method that you
would use to copy files between drives (e.g. Drag-and-Drop). Files may be placed
wherever you like on the player, but it is strongly suggested NOT to put them in the
/.rockbox folder and instead put them in any other folder, e.g. /, /music or /audio. The
default directory structure that is assumed by some parts of Rockbox (album art
searching, and missing-tag fallback in some WPSes) uses the parent directory of
a song as the Album name, and the parent directory of that folder as the Artist
name. WPSes may display information incorrectly if your files are not properly
tagged, and you have your music organized in a way different than they assume when
attempting to guess the Artist and Album names from your filetree. See section C for the
requirements for Album Art to work properly. See section B.1 for a list of supported audio
formats.

3.1.4The first contact

After you have first started the player, you’ll be presented by the Main Menu. From this menu you
can reach every function of Rockbox, for more information (see section 5.1). To browse the
files on your player, select Files (see section 4.1), and to browse in a view that is based on the
meta-data1
of your audio files, select Database (see section 4.2).

3.1.5Basic controls

When browsing files and moving through menus you usually get a list view presented. The
navigation in these lists are usually the same and should be pretty intuitive. In the tree view
use Down and Up to move around the selection. Use Select or Right to select an item.
When browsing the file system selecting an audio file plays it. The view switches to the “While
playing screen”, usually abbreviated as “WPS” (see section 4.3. The dynamic playlist gets
replaced with the contents of the current directory. This way you can easily treat
directories as playlists. The created dynamic playlist can be extended or modified
while playing. This is also known as “on-the-fly playlist”. To go back to the File
Browser stop the playback with the Power button or return to the file browser while
keeping playback running using Select. In list views you can go back one step with
Left.

3.1.6Basic concepts

Playlists

Rockbox is playlist oriented. This means that every time you play an audio file, a so-called
“dynamic playlist” is generated, unless you play a saved playlist. You can modify the dynamic
playlist while playing and also save it to a file. If you do not want to use playlists
you can simply play your files directory based. Playlists are covered in detail in
section 4.4.

Menu

From the menu you can customise Rockbox. Rockbox itself is very customisable. Also there
are some special menus for quick access to frequently used functions.

Context Menu

Some views, especially the file browser and the WPS have a context menu. From the file
browser this can be accessed with Long Select. The contents of the context menu vary,
depending on the situation it gets called. The context menu itself presents you with some
operations you can perform with the currently highlighted file. In the file browser this is
the file (or directory) that is highlighted by the cursor. From the WPS this is the
currently playing file. Also there are some actions that do not apply to the current file
but refer to the screen from which the context menu gets called. One example is
the playback menu, which can be called using the context menu from within the
WPS.

3.2Customising Rockbox

Rockbox’ User Interface can be customised using “Themes”. Themes usually only affect
the visual appearance, but an advanced user can create a theme that also changes
various other settings like file view, LCD settings and all other settings that can be
modified using .cfg files. This topic is discussed in more detail in section 12.3.
The Rockbox distribution comes with some themes that should look nice on your
player.

Note: Some of the themes shipped with Rockbox need additional fonts from the fonts
package, so make sure you installed them. Also, if you downloaded additional themes from the
Internet make sure you have the needed fonts installed as otherwise the theme may not display
properly.

3.3USB Charging

To charge your player over USB, hold any button while plugging it in. This will prevent it
from connecting to your computer and let you continue to use it normally. Your player must
already be in Rockbox for this to function.

Note: Be aware that this button may still perform its normal function, so it is recommended
to use a button without harmful side effects, such as Menu.